City of Toronto Heritage Census Project

The City of Toronto wishes to assemble a comprehensive set of available historical neighbourhood-scale Census data. While a wealth of historical Canadian Census data exist in the public domain, it is largely inaccessible to users who lack specialized training and skills due fragmentation of data holdings and their storage in different formats. Making use of existing data is extremely labour-intensive, as the user must contend with multiple legacy file formats and variable naming schemes and geographic unit identification codes that are inconsistent across time. Building on established historical Census, data management, and spatial analysis expertise at Western University and the University of Toronto, this project will create a fully documented spatial dataset that contains available Census data for submunicipal areas, including uniform identifier codes for variables and geographic unit across the entire time period. While useful for the City of Toronto, the techniques used are applicable to other geographic locations and levels. The historical Census database created by this project will be used as a decision support and planning tool for the Toronto Heritage Survey. Awareness of the timing and location of historical cultural communities will facilitate engagement with both historic and contemporary community groups as the City of Toronto conducts the Toronto Heritage Survey. More generally, the historical Census database will be made available to all City of Toronto divisions to allow use of these products in a wide range of possible cases.

Faculty Supervisor:

Daniel Silver;Zachary Taylor

Student:

Partner:

City of Toronto

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Health and Related Sciences & Technology; Public administration; Utilities

University:

The University of Western Ontario; University of Toronto

Program: